It certainly is a great way to get a lot of the haters that have been popping up in recent weeks.
But as I’ve been saying time and time again on this site, until we can see otherwise, we have to see if this becomes the norm, or if the game on Saturday was just the exception.
Speaking in the aftermath of the game against Preston North End on Saturday, QPR goalkeeper Joe Lumley spoke about how he’s managed to get rid of some of the mistakes from his game and now he is reaping the reward after keeping the team’s first clean sheet of the season:
“Yeah definitely. If you play a good game you gain a bit of confidence. I know I’ve made a few mistakes but I just keep working hard and doing the same thing, don’t change anything, and that’s it really. I accept that I’m going to make mistakes and unluckily for myself they’ve happened probably too much this season. I haven’t meant it. I haven’t really played a bad 90 minutes it’s just one moment in a game that I get punished and it leads to a goal which gets highlighted.”
The goalkeeping position is hard, as he mentions if he makes a mistake, it will lead to a goal and it will be highlighted, but that doesn’t mean that he should be free from criticism just because of his position.
If he makes one mistake, fair enough, everyone makes them. But it’s when those mistakes start racking up in large numbers that we need to start concerning ourselves. Just like I’ve been concerned with manager Mark Warburton and his success and failure rate at the club, it’s when a trend starts to appear that we need to take notice.
Should Joe Lumley be dropped?
Yes
No
That’s why there were questions about his form, and one good game isn’t going to make all the doubts go away. He’s going to need to back them up with a number of mistake-free games before we can truly say that his position as number one goalkeeper isn’t under threat.
